God Remembers What We Forget

I have a bad habit of forgetting.

I can be doing one thing and then very quickly forget what I was trying to accomplish. I can have a purpose in mind but easily lose sight of it.

On a much larger scale, it’s easy for me to forget the Lord and His works.

The Lord has been so incredibly kind to me in my lifetime, yet in one bad moment, I can forget all He has done.

I have a nasty habit of falling back into sin that the Lord has already granted me victory over.

Why do I do this?

I was reading in Psalm 106 this morning, and there was a moment of clarity.

This psalm recounts the Lord’s faithfulness to His people. It tells of His mighty works and acts of deliverance, and it contrasts His deeds with Israel’s sin.

Over and over again, the people fall back into sin. They continually choose their own desires over God.

Ironically, when the Lord allows them to be given over to their desires, the people later complain about it!

“Then they despised the pleasant land, having no faith in his promise. They murmured in their tents, and did not obey the voice of the Lord” (Psalm 106:24-25).

Sin patterns happen when we forget the works of the Lord.

“They exchanged the glory of God for the image of an ox that eats grass. They forgot God, their Savior, who had done great things in Egypt…” (Psalm 106:20-21).

Still, the Lord continued to show up.

“Nevertheless, he looked upon their distress, when he heard their cry. For their sake he remembered His covenant, and relented according to the abundance of His steadfast love” (Psalm 106:44-45).

When this verse talks about God “remembering” His covenant, it does not imply that He forgot.

However, we as a people forget are the ones who forget. In the midst of our mess, we forget that God is good and that He is working. So, when He rescues us from a certain situation or the mess of our sin, it feels like He remembered.

But He always remembers what we forget.

He remains the same, even when we wander and turn back to the very thing He rescued us from in the first place (2 Tim. 2:13).

That’s why it is so important to recount His goodness daily. We have to remind ourselves constantly of His work.

Through preaching the gospel to ourselves every day and telling stories of God’s faithfulness, we can fight back against forgetting and falling into the same pattern of sin.